Reunion at Red Paint Bay

He felt odd walking across the parking lot of the Bays-water Inn without Amy, as if there was an imbalance to him, the lack of a counterweight. And what would his classmates think? Why would he come to the reunion without his wife when they live only a few minutes from the inn?

“Simon?” came the call from behind him, and there was Holly Green coming down the gravel path, alone herself.

“Where’s Steve?” he asked as she caught up.

“Home with Jenny. Where’s Amy?”

“Home with Davey.”

“So,” she said, linking her arm in his, “we can walk in together, cause a stir.”

When they reached the front door of the inn she turned toward the bay, about fifty yards down the winding drive. “I saw the obituary,” she said.

“You didn’t know about Jean?”

“No, we were distant cousins. We only kept in touch at Christmas. I know she got married to that guy a year behind us who was always following her around. I never understood why she did that. She said she found him a little creepy.”

Voices came from the parking lot, and Simon moved Holly away from the front door into the darkness. He hoped it wasn’t too obvious that he didn’t want to be heard. “You drove her home on graduation night,” he said just above a whisper as the voices passed them by.

“She told me she wasn’t feeling well, like she was having a bad period and was embarrassed, that’s why she didn’t ask you.”

The moon emerged from behind the clouds, and a milky light illuminated the dock. Simon was surprised at how clearly it could be seen from so far away.

“The obituary,” Holly said, “it mentioned a brutal attack twenty-five years ago.”

“I don’t know what that was about,” Simon said. He let a few moments go by for Holly to say something. When she didn’t he said, “Do you?”

“Maybe it had to do with that guy. Seems like he was always pestering her that last year here. But I think she would have told me if he had actually attacked her. Jean was a very sensitive person, like a raw nerve.” Simon hadn’t thought of that description of her before, but it seemed exactly right. The moon went under the clouds, and he took Holly’s arm again. “Shall we go in?”



“Memory lane,” Simon said to Lauren, his former lab partner in chemistry. “Next we’ll be bobbing for apples and passing an orange down the line with no hands.”

She grazed his arm with hers. “Sounds like fun.” He didn’t dare look at her straight on and have to answer the ever-present questions in her eyes, Why not me, Simon? Why not now? He would think the answer was obvious—he was married with an eleven-year-old son.

“Simon Howe!” someone called from across the ballroom. A red-haired man wearing a baseball cap with a swordfish decal sewed on the brim pushed through the crowd, swinging a bottle of beer from his fingertips, just like old times. Simon recognized him instantly, a larger-sized, bearded version of his once best friend.

“Brewer,” Simon said as he extended his hand, “how long has it been?”

The big man ignored the hand and bear-hugged Simon, something they would never have done as teenagers. When he pulled away he gestured toward the banner over the platform. “Twenty-five years, old buddy. I haven’t set foot in town since graduation. I figured I should make the effort once every twenty-five years.”

“I can’t believe it,” Simon said, how this face that he had seen every day of his life in high school, the person he could tell anything to, was suddenly there again. “I lost track of you after you had that trouble in Portland. Where’re you living now?”

“Ha Ha Bay.”

It sounded like one of Brewer’s jokes, but Simon didn’t get it.

“It’s in Newfoundland. I was sitting in a jail up in Kodiak City and all they had to read was old National Geos. This story mentioned Ha Ha Bay, and I said, man, that sounds like the place for me. So when I got out I headed back across country, bought a couple acres of land up there for nothing and built myself a cabin. There’s only three hundred people in town, and I figured, I can get along with three hundred people.”

Strange, Simon thought, because Brewer never had a problem getting along with anyone before. It was his most positive trait. Mr. Congeniality. “So, what do you do up there?”

“Nothing, that’s the beauty of the place. I made so much money fishing ten seasons in Alaska I don’t need to work till who knows when, maybe never. I invested all of the money I didn’t drink away. Don’t you love capitalism?”

Simon did and didn’t. He could see the good and the bad of it, as in everything. It wasn’t a question to be answered at a high school reunion anyway. “Sounds like you’ve had some wild times, Brew.”

“Oh yeah, but the crazy stuff gets boring after a while. I figured I’d settle down.” He took a quick swig, still gripping the bottle high up on the neck. “But how about you, Simon? Putting out the old rag, I hear.”

“He’s owner and editor of the Register,” Lauren said, which surprised Simon, that she was still there and part of the conversation.

Brewer looked at her for a moment like he didn’t recognize her. Apparently Lauren had changed considerably since high school. “I would never have figured it,” he said to Simon, “you staying in this f*cking town. You were always talking about getting out first chance. I figured you’d beat me to the door.”

“I did leave for a while,” Simon said, an attempt at a defense. “I worked in Portland at the Press Herald.”

Brewer emptied his bottle. “So,” he said.

“So?”

“Why’d you come back?”

There was the question, plain and simple. One could always count on his old friend to ask it. Why had he returned to Red Paint? That was easy—his parents getting sick within weeks of each other and needing his care. But why did he stay after they died? That wasn’t so plain and simple. He liked saving the Register. He liked being the boss of his own paper. He liked the idea of Davey growing up where he had, in a little town in Maine, far from the temptations of the city. “Boring” actually seemed like a positive attribute back then. “You know how it is,” Simon said, “you make some choices and then some more choices and suddenly you end up spending your life where you never expected.”

“Yeah, like me, I never thought I’d be living on Ha Ha Bay.” Brewer rolled the empty beer bottle in his hands. “You’re like happy here?”

“Sure,” Simon said quickly, and he wondered if it came out too fast, as if he didn’t really want to think about the question. “I have a great wife and son, it’s a good place to raise a family. And I like running the newspaper, so yes, I’m happy.”

“That’s all that counts then, isn’t it? As long as you’re happy.” As long as you’re happy. Despite the apparent drabness of life in Red Paint, if he had carved out some small refuge of happiness here, then great. It was nice of Brewer to grant him this. His friend took another swig of his beer. “So, how long have you two been hitched?”

It took Simon a moment to understand Brewer’s inclusive glance of him and Lauren. “Oh no,” he said, “this is Lauren Canelli. You remember her.”

“Oh yeah,” Brewer said without any remembrance in his voice, “how’s it going?”

She looked past him toward the microphone.

“My wife Amy had to stay home tonight with our son,” Simon said. “We’ve had some things going on lately, and she didn’t want to leave him alone.”

“Simon,” Lauren said, touching his arm again, “you were a National Merit Scholar.”

“Yes, why?”

“Simon was!” she called out, and it embarrassed him to hear his name shouted across the room.

On the platform, Greer pointed toward them. “Simon Howe, our editor in chief, were you a National Merit Scholar?”

He waved and nodded.

“Okay, then, I guess this question is about you. Want to confess what you got away with on graduation night?”

Simon turned up his hands and shrugged, with a little I don’t know and wouldn’t tell if I did expression. Before he turned back he glanced around the ballroom, a sweep of faces. Which one of them was accusing him?

“I’ll have to get my spies investigating that one,” Greer said. “The next card asks: Who sneaked off to the dock during the graduation party, and what did he do there? Another graduation question. Any takers?”

Brewer nudged him. “You ducked out early, Si.”

It irritated him that his friend was remembering his high school life so assuredly. “Why would you think that?”

“They called for the king and queen to do a dance, and you weren’t around, so I jumped in with Ginnie. I wouldn’t forget that.”

Ginnie. Why hadn’t she turned up at the reunion? They could have shared a dance together now. A king needed his queen, even after twenty-five years. “I must have ducked out for a little refreshment about then,” Simon said. “We all did at some point, right?”

“That all you ducked out for, old buddy?”

“Moving on,” Greer said from the platform, “why didn’t anyone listen when the girl on the dock …”

Simon felt the past jolting back into his brain—the girl, the dock, and the words in the obit … brutal attack.

“You okay?” Lauren touched his arm again—how many times would she do it?—squeezing a little.

He tried to smile, but he could tell by her face that his mouth was doing something else. “I guess I’ve had too much to drink.”

“You never had the stomach for it,” Brewer said.

“You need some air,” Lauren said soothingly. “There’s a wonderful breeze off the bay tonight.”

“That sounds good.” She picked her pocketbook off the chair and slung it over her shoulder. He imagined how it would look, crossing the room with Lauren, heading outside. “I don’t want to drag you away,” he said. “I’ll just be a minute.” He slipped off quickly, angling through the dancers swaying to “I Will Survive” suddenly blaring from the speakers. He swung his head each way as he went, hoping to catch a gaze fixed on him. Whoever wrote those questions would certainly be watching for his reaction. So many faces—old classmates grown older, thicker, the men with beards and mustaches, the women heavier, stockier, mothers now, not the slender schoolgirls that remained in his memory. Everywhere he looked heads turned away, eyes averted.

He pushed through the double screen doors of the inn and hesitated on the porch for a moment, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness. He heard people talking on either side of him, the gravelly voices of the unrepentant smokers in the class. He hurried down the steps and headed toward the parking lot overflowing with cars angled in all directions. He found the old Corolla, climbed in, and slammed the door to make sure it wouldn’t pop open at the first big bump. He swerved around the jutting front ends of much better cars and turned onto the dirt entrance road. It felt good suddenly leaving like this, telling no one. Why should he have to explain himself? Headlights appeared behind him, someone else fleeing the scene, no doubt. The lights grew bigger, coming up quickly behind him, then flashed to bright. He shielded the rearview mirror with his hand, but white light flooded his car, making the way ahead completely dark and everything that might be in his way unseeable. He slowed a little, and the follower slowed, too. He flicked his hand in a back-off gesture, but how might that appear, as a friendly wave? He slowed even more, squinting to make sure a deer or dog or even a person wasn’t up ahead. He couldn’t go on like this, driving blind. He stopped. The car behind stopped, too. Simon opened the door and shook his fist. That could not be misinterpreted. The lights turned down for a moment, then flashed bright again. Simon started toward the light, and it was like in a science fiction movie, the lone human moving toward the alien presence on a deserted country road. He heard the engine rev up, a screech of the wheels, and the lights came toward him. He couldn’t believe this was happening. He didn’t know exactly what was happening. He ran back to the Toyota, but there wasn’t time to get in. He pressed himself against the door and closed his eyes as the vehicle rushed toward him like a furious wind.





It’s curious to him how relaxed he feels submitting to another human being’s inspection and analysis. Maybe it is Amy Howe herself, the scent of her perfume, with its hint of citrus mellowing his brain. He has been uncommonly cooperative today. Fifteen minutes so far, and he hasn’t resorted to sarcasm once.

She inhales suddenly, as if bracing herself with an extra hit of oxygen. “When you married Jean, did you know she had been raped?”

How could he miss it, just a stone’s throw away, a tableau on the dock illuminated by the moon and the harsh light from the parking lot? “I saw it.”

Amy’s eyes widen. Apparently she can be shocked. “You witnessed Jean’s attack?”

“From a distance.” He knows what must be going through her mind … “I could have stopped Jean from being raped?”

“Is that what you think?”

A question to a question. He will add his own. “Is that what you want me to think?”

“What you think is up to you. I’m just trying to explore what that thinking is.”

“My thinking is that I couldn’t have stopped her being raped.”

“And afterward you couldn’t stop the suffering the rape caused your wife.”

“That’s right. I’m a failure on both counts.”

“I’m not judging you, Mr. Chambers.”

Of course she is. One cannot help but judge every second of one’s existence. To consider is to judge.

She opens the manila folder on her desk and reads for a few moments, as if answers might be there. “When did you marry Jean?”

He notices now that she is wearing only one earring, a light blue teardrop, possibly topaz, hanging from her delicate left ear. This earring shivers a little when she moves her head. In the other ear, nothing. Is this a mistake or some new fashion? She reaches up to her right ear where he’s looking, feels the absence herself, surveys her desk, and finds the missing teardrop by the phone. She sticks it back in her ear in a single quick move. When did you marry Jean? A change-of-pace question calculated to lower the intensity level a bit.

“After.”

“After?”

“Her rape, her move from town, the loss of her baby. After everything.”

“Did you marry Jean thinking that you could heal her?”

Heal her—a therapist’s way of thinking, and a woman’s way. “I married Jean thinking that I loved her.”

“And your love wasn’t enough to make her whole again?”

“Love’s never enough.” Paul says. “Love doesn’t stop pain. Love doesn’t stop hate. They say love and hate are two sides of the same coin, but that’s wrong. Love and hate are on the same side of the coin, all mixed up together. Nothing separates love and hate.”

“Are you saying you ended up loving and hating Jean?”

Of course he’s saying that. Does he really need to state the obvious? Why do therapists always make you do that, as if there’s no truth without words? He says, “Do you think all men are capable of rape?” Another incendiary question, blurted out. It must be considered his hallmark now. Perhaps that’s how she refers to him with Simon—my patient who blurts things out.

He meets her eyes. They’re dark green, a stirred-up sea. “I think there is the potential for violence in all people,” she says, “male or female, and sometimes it expresses itself as rape.”

“And before it expresses itself you can’t tell who’s capable of it, right? Any average ordinary guy—like an uncle or cousin or a husband, even a mild-mannered man like me, for instance—could rape, under certain circumstances.” She looks up at him, sensing he has more to say. “And I did.”

“You raped someone?”

“Jean.”

“You raped your wife?”

The surprise in her voice surprises him. “Being married doesn’t give a man license for sex on demand, does it?”

“No, but normally—”

“There was no normally in our marriage. Jean did everything she could to avoid sex with me.”

“From the beginning of your marriage?”

“From the beginning through the middle to the end.”

“I see.”

He rises a bit from his seat. “Could you stop saying that? You don’t see, so please stop saying it.”

She hesitates, then, “I was going to say that normally—”

He doesn’t care what she was going to say. “A year after we married,” he says, “on our anniversary night, I decided I’d waited long enough. So I crawled on top of Jean in bed, my weight holding her down, and I spread her legs and I …” He can’t say the word. Surely she knows what he means. “That’s how I did it, maybe twice a year, no more. She didn’t even fight me after the first. But each time I had sex with my wife I felt like I was raping her. Raping her,” he says louder.

Amy leans over her desk toward him. “Mr. Chambers?”

“Raping her!” he shouts.

She picks up her notepad and raps it one sharp time on the desk—“Stop!” It’s so surprising, this outburst of energy from her, that he obeys. She says, “I’m afraid I’m going to have to end our session early today.”

“You’re afraid?”

“It’s just a figure of speech. I have—”

“—other pressing business?”

“… a family matter to attend to.”

She gets up from her seat, and he does, too, a little too fast. He steadies himself with a hand on her desk. “That’s a coincidence,” he says, “because I have a family matter to attend to as well.”

She tugs down on her blouse, a protective little gesture. “You didn’t mention having family in the area,” she says in a calmer voice, feeling back on safe ground, talking about families.

Paul shakes his head. “I don’t. You do.”

She takes a step around the desk, and he meets her there, within arm’s reach, just bare space between them. She slides sideways, and he mirrors her move, as if in a dance, perfect harmony. He can’t remember the last time he danced—in middle school, perhaps, some forced affair where the boys are prodded across the room toward a wall of girls a head taller, girls who giggle with their friends and shake their heads, No, of course not, No, how could he even ask?

“I need you to step away, Mr. Chambers.” How would she deal with a patient who won’t obey her command? She must have some other weapon of persuasion besides merely telling him in a stern voice to step away. “Are you hearing me?”

He smiles—there it is again, inappropriate without fail. He just can’t help himself. He cups his ear, mockingly. “I hear you loud and clear. Do you hear me, I want to—”

“You need to move away from me right now or I’m going to call the police to remove you from my office.”

Such an illogical statement. If he wouldn’t move out of her way so she could leave, why would he let her call the police? He wouldn’t expect such lazy thinking from her. To make the situation perfectly clear: “And if I stop you from making the call?”

“It’s not going to come to that. You’re going to get out of my way.”

“I understand that’s what you think, but if I don’t, then what?” What tricks does she have up her sleeve? Mace, a hidden gun? Perhaps a silent alarm, activated already by the press of a button on her desk? Maybe in New York, but not here in Red Paint, a friendly town, like the sign says. A village almost.

“If I call out, people will come very quickly, I assure you.”

“In a perfect world, yes, people would come running from all directions to see what the matter is. But sometimes a woman screams and nobody comes.”

She makes the connection quickly. “I’m sorry if that’s what happened to your wife, but this session has to end right now.”

“So, to recap,” he says, “a grieving man comes to your office seeking help about his wife who was raped just a few miles from here. You accuse him of watching this rape and doing nothing.”

“I didn’t say that, I—”

“Couldn’t you have intervened, Mr. Chambers?” he says, mimicking her probing, rhetorical voice. “Couldn’t you have pulled the rapist off, Mr. Chambers? Couldn’t you have acted like a man, Mr. Chambers?”

“You need to calm—”

“A grieving husband gets a bit angry and raises his voice,” Paul says, raising his voice in time with the words. “He confides to you that he felt like a rapist every time he had sex with his wife. Your response is to end the session right now and call the police? I thought the goal of your profession was to help people in pain, Ms. Howe. Or do you only treat the calm and compliant sorts, the easy patients, the women?”

“I’m not debating this with you.” She starts toward the phone.

Of course she wouldn’t get into a debate with her client. But she might, for a moment, want to consider the unusual circumstances in which she finds herself. “You should think twice about calling the police,” he says. “It could cause more trouble, and your husband wouldn’t like that.” Her face turns pale, and he wonders what the physiology of this reaction is, how fear works so quickly through the bloodstream. He’s said the magic words—your husband. It’s no longer just about her. Imagine if he’d said your son. She can’t bring herself to ask the question What about my husband?, because that would mean she’s engaging in this little scene he has created. He will continue on his own. “I’m sure you want to know what your husband has to do with this, so I’ll tell you. If the police come, you’ll tell your side of the story and I’ll tell mine, which includes the identity of the man who raped my wife. Do you want to take a guess?”

“I don’t know what you’re trying to do here, but—”

“Aren’t you a little curious about your husband, the rapist?” Husband, rapist. It must be the first time she has heard these words together. How shocking they must sound. “And once you’re a rapist, you can’t not be a rapist. It’s a law, Aristotle’s law of the excluded middle. Maybe you’re familiar with it?”

She does not answer.

“No? I sense you’d be very comfortable with Aristotle. Either-or, this-that, right-wrong. No middle ground. So which is your husband, rapist or not rapist?”

She reaches for the phone, but he covers it with his right hand. She takes a quick breath and chokes on it, coughs for a few moments. Then, “I’ll give you five seconds to remove yourself from my office. Five seconds.”

It amuses him that she feels in the position to offer an ultimatum. He raises his left hand, spreads his fingers and counts down for her, bending his little finger first. “Of course you’re curious. A smart woman like yourself, the healer of the community.” Then his ring finger. “… who learns that the man she’s been married to for sixteen years raped a girl.” The middle finger. “… and got away with it.” The index finger. “… and hasn’t paid for his sin at all.” Now the thumb curls over the rest, making a fist. “Five seconds,” he says. “That’s all it took to tell the story of your husband’s life. Sometimes there’s only one fact you need to know about a person, isn’t that true? Now you know that one fact about your husband.” She looks at him, then away, as if he’s some scary dog—a German shepherd or Doberman pinscher—that gets aggressive when challenged eye to eye. He never realized he had it in himself to appear so frightening.

“Deep down you know your husband is one of those ordinary men quite capable of rape. He wouldn’t drag anyone off the sidewalk into the bushes, nothing crude like that, but he did lure a girl onto the dock by the Bayswater Inn, and he raped her. Raped her,” Paul says in a louder voice. “Raped her!” he shouts, then tilts his ear to the ceiling. “You’d think somebody would come running, like you said. How long will it take? I could yell even louder. Or maybe you want to try?” She scans the room, looking for a possible exit. The window, not a viable option, closed tight against the July heat. How would she get there, shove it up, and jump through without his calmly walking behind her and hauling her back inside, his hands wrapped around her waist? Besides, consider how hard the fall would be, ten feet down into the asphalt parking lot, a tangle of limbs twisted in unnatural directions. No, she has to stay and listen. “Then he couldn’t even let her alone afterward. Your husband called the girl and told her she better keep quiet because he’d spread it all over town that she had sex with him, and that would ruin her reputation more than his.”

“I don’t believe you.” Still a calm voice. An admirable coolness considering the situation she now finds herself in.

“There’s what you believe,” Paul says, “and what really happened. You can always take your pick.” He removes his hand from the phone.

She grabs the receiver and punches in the numbers 911.

That’s okay, he’s said enough. He’ll go gently now. He has another appointment to keep anyway.